In the streets of Denocte he breathes decadence, the pungent sway of exotic incense and the aroma of sweet wines that carry in the breeze – of cigars, violet plumes, the rich perfumes of gallant dames trotting in the cleanest streets. It is cloying, suffocating sweetness that chokes him from the markets tonight; stirred from their cloud of luxury that looms above their head like dizzying heaven-smog. He escaped their wares – he aches for the wild, the feral, the untouched reaches of that which he may never have but oh to taste! On the edge of his lips and fangs and fingertips pressed to the barrel, longing, a distant cast of wanting eyes that seek everything within their property. His eyes are those of a hawk's – meekly set, though severe and covetous, for the world belongs to him. but tonight, luxury does not sate his appetites. Tonight, is the moon and her temple.
The eve unfolds as if a dream – the softened, heavy rest of pin-pricked starlight that cascades in galaxic currents, and its pregnant moon – a glow permeates through the treacherous ridges of the Arma Mountains. It smooths its basking pallor along its sharpest edges, lounges in the valleys of its lethal pitfalls. Milk-white and soothing, its ghost visits the deep with a breath of frosting chill, webbed along each star-kissed peak. And yet its fullest breadth finds its light in dawning upon the halls of the secret Temple. It pours in from each basking point – floods the halls and bathes the altar in a pool of misting lunar shroud. Each glimmer is a star plucked from the night sky. Each golden vein is a ray stolen from the godless sun. And while the winds scream in the wilds of the mountain, a restless silence stands in the solemn halls, the pristine rooms of decadent marble. Or was it – he could still not determine their unearthly craft – were it marble, bone, milky quartz, that of ivory or granite. All he knows is that they are not cold to the touch, as they should be – as a monument of stone should, in years of neglect, harbor some cold in the nearing gasps of winter that close over the mountains like a hound over a hare. They are not warm either, not as if they had absorbed the full length of daylight presented to them, or even that of which dawn could offer, cloudless and narrowed. They just were, simply put – suspended in a nothingness that he found more comforting than any grand hall that could possibly be offered to him.
His return was not something he initially planned, when he last left the halls to the device of others. Yet the temple resided in the back of his mind, thrumming there like a pulse that thundered against his skull. It moved him, called to him, the aching in his bones still – the awful knowing of the world and its workings and then again the grating unknowing that cursed mortality – a force of wind that took to storm through his veins, his machinated motives, his every dream tinged with the solitary whisper of curiosity. Were the wine ever too heavy to drown his every thought in pleasure and discord, his instinct forever remained, and it called to him still: to return to advent nature, prescribed his explorative need for conquest. and forever, his possessive whim.
The silence that winds through the halls are broken by the clap of his hoof against the dusty floors. And another, and another, it is as though he could shake the mountains in the weight of their echo – until their noise too falls into the quiet that unsettles the room with white noise and whispers of the protective dead. In him, his blood sings – for the air and for the milk-white walls etched in centurial wisdom that he breathes against, inhaling a deep drag of dust and an ancient air that with it brings a piece of its former glory. Immersed in this holy place, he cannot but consume every inch with a heavy gaze, wild and laden in the awe that isn't even hindered by a second glance. He is at freedom to peruse, to learn its every room, its every crook and narrow passage that seems carved by so godly a hand.
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